What a Weekend!!

First for the preliminaries: no one (people or pets) was hurt in any of the events that follow.

How's that for a lead? It was about 4:30 a.m. Saturday (Damon was at his dad's for the weekend), and Christy and I awoke to the sound of an alarm going off. Neither of us had a good sense of what it was for although we both thought it was from someone breaking in. Well, that turned out not to be the case.

I followed the smell of smoke up to our loft and found a small fire near the computer. Luckily, it was still very small, and we were able to dump a small amount of water on it and put it out.

Afterward, I was having a look at the scene, and noticed that some of the power cords to the various components of the computer had melted at the plug, and the cord to the cable modem had burned the most. However, even at this point, we are not sure of the exact cause. Our insurance adjuster came yesterday and collected a couple of pieces to be sent off for investigation. It may be some time before we know the cause if we ever do.

It is now about 5:00 a.m., and the immediate crisis had passed. However, we now had quite the scent going in the main part of the house. There wasn't much that we could do at that point so we tried to lay back down.

After calling around to our agent and talking to other people with State Farm, we had a crew out that evening to treat the air ducts to neutralize the order. It wasn't really clear to us what we signed up for by having them come that evening, but before they got started at about 9:00 p.m., they told us that after they finished, we and our dogs would need to be out of the house for about an hour. Ugh!

So we went ahead and loaded up the dogs and headed out to kill time. Though it seemed like madness, the first place we went was the dog park in Fort Worth. We thought we'd give the dogs a chance to wear themselves out if the park was still open. Much to my surprise, the hours of the dog park were 5:00 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. So we stayed there for about an hour. There were a couple of other dogs there so Kassie and Rocket got to run and play quite a bit. However, once the dogs showed signs of being tired and the mosquitoes showed signs of being hungry, we decided to pack the dogs up and move on.

Luckily, it is still fairly cool in the evening so we knew the dogs would be OK in the van while we went elsewhere to kill time. So at this point so we headed over to Borders at Hulin and 30. Both dogs crashed by the time we got there, and the slept quietly in the van while we milled about. We got the call about 10:15 p.m. that we could return home in about an hour. This was perfect timing since Borders closed at 11:00 p.m. and it was about 20 minutes from our house.

When we got home, it smelled considerably better, and we went to bed quickly as we don't typically stay up this late as a matter of course anymore. I think we were both tired enough that we slept without much consideration of a repeat incident.

We have temporarily taken our house off the market until we can get the carpet and other damage replaced. At a minimum we have to replace some power cords on the computer at home before we can even check it out to see if it is still in working order. Our e-mail access during that time is going to be fairly sparse in case you are wondering why we are slow to respond. Everything is going to be fine; it's just going to take a bit to restore order again. I'll try to get posts up on a semi-regular basis between now and then.

Until next time...
PH